The stability of the electricity system literally fluctuates as the wind blows and the sun shines. And it will fluctuate even more in the future with the introduction of more renewable electricity from solar cell and wind farms. A cloud can pass over the sun, or it can suddenly blow.
To avoid imbalances, outages and disruptions in the electricity grid, and to maintain high security of supply, technical equipment such as synchronous compensators is needed, so that there is always balance and power in your and my sockets.
And Energinet has purchased just such a synchronous compensator from its Norwegian counterpart Stattnet. The synchronous compensator is identical to a machine that Energinet has in Tjele near Viborg, which can therefore use the spare parts. The machine had become surplus in Norway, as a result of changes in the Norwegian electricity grid and is now using more hydropower to stabilize the electricity grid in Norway.
The synchronous compensator does not generate electricity itself, but it creates a precise frequency balance in an electricity grid, which otherwise easily becomes unbalanced with the introduction of more green energy from solar cells and wind turbines.
Once in a life time
Energinet gets the spare parts at the scrap price plus the costs of dismantling and transport to Denmark. That is a total of approx. four million kroner. One rotor blade in the synchronous compensator weighs nine tons, and there are eight of them. That is why five trucks of parts have been driven to the transformer station in Tjele.
- Is it a good business to buy almost 50-year-old spare parts, you might ask. Here I must clearly answer YES. The spare parts have paid for themselves twice over, if we only experience one outage on our old synchronous compensator, says Jesper Bak, an electrical installer in Emergency and Condition DK1 at Energinet.
He adds in relation to the economy that if you had to go out and have a brand new synchronous compensator made, it would cost several hundred million kroner.
- In my 26 years at Energinet, I have been involved in many interesting and important projects, but this beats them all. There are so few of these machines in the world that it is something of a scoop that we get access to these spare parts. It is once in a lifetime, says Jesper Bak.
Text, graphics, images, sound, and other content on this website are protected under copyright law. DK Medier reserves all rights to the content, including the right to exploit the content for the purpose of text and data mining, cf. Section 11b of the Copyright Act and Article 4 of the DSM Directive.
Customers with IP agreements/major customer agreements may only share Danish Offshore Industry articles internally for the purpose of handling specific cases. Sharing in connection with specific cases refers to journaling, archiving, or similar uses.
Customers with a personal subscription/login may not share Danish Offshore Industry articles with individuals who do not themselves have a personal subscription to Danish Offshore Industry.
Any deviation from the above requires written consent from DK Medier.
